Monthly Archives: September 2016

And since then, one of the central principles behind my philosophy has been “Don’t destroy all existing systems and hope a planet-sized ghost makes everything work out”. Systems are hard. Institutions are hard. If your goal is to replace the current systems with better ones, then destroying the current system is 1% of the work, and building the better ones is 99% of it. Throughout history, dozens of movements have doomed entire civilizations by focusing on the “destroying the current system” step and expecting the “build a better one” step to happen on its own. That never works. The best parts of conservativism are the ones that guard this insight and shout it at a world too prone to taking shortcuts.

Donald Trump does not represent those best parts of conservativism. To transform his movement into Marxism, just replace “the bourgeoisie” with “the coastal elites” and “false consciousness” with “PC speech”. Just replace the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of the workers, with the assumption that everything will work itself out once power is in the hands of “real Americans”. Just replace the hand-waving lack of plans with what to do after the Revolution with a hand-waving lack of plans what to do after the election. In both cases, the sheer virtue of the movement, and the apocalyptic purification of the rich people keeping everyone else down, is supposed to mean everything will just turn out okay on its own. That never works.

…US conservatism is in crisis, and I think that crisis might end better if Trump loses than if he wins.

Since a country with thriving conservative and liberal parties is lower-variance than one with lots of liberals but no effective conservatism, I would like conservatism to get out of crisis as soon as possible and reach the point where it could form an effective opposition. It would also be neat if whatever form conservatism ended out taking had some slight contact with reality and what would help the country (this is not meant as a dig at conservatives – I’m not sure the Democrats have much contact with reality or helps the country either; I’m wishing for the moon and stars here).

As usual, Alexander says everything that needs to be said. I too hope to see a revitalized, healthy conservatism assert itself once the Trumpian fever breaks. That hope might be the only thing to sustain me through four-to-eight more years of our culture being absolutely saturated with social justice zealotry.

When I was growing up in the ’60s and early ’70s, conservatives were the enforcers of conformity. It was the right that was suspicious, sniffing out Communists and scrutinizing public figures for signs of sedition.

Now the role of oppressor has passed to the left.

…Ms. Abdel-Magied got the question right: How is this happening? How did the left in the West come to embrace restriction, censorship and the imposition of an orthodoxy at least as tyrannical as the anti-Communist, pro-Christian conformism I grew up with? Liberals have ominously relabeled themselves “progressives,” forsaking a noun that had its roots in “liber,” meaning free. To progress is merely to go forward, and you can go forward into a pit.

I suppose you could say that it’s just another case of power corrupting. People with cultural territory to defend are fearful of losing it. Or you could look at the way in which left-wing politics have incorporated the worst aspects of the recovery movement, where everyone is defined by the supposed traumas and abuses that have shaped them from childhood, thus requiring politics to become another form of therapy. Or maybe it’s just the inevitable end game of a political outlook that always aimed too high and has now lost momentum and direction. Even the “sane” progressives have little to offer but nostalgia anymore, dreaming of a magical return to the unique conditions of the postwar welfare state, defining themselves against those dreaded conservatives primarily by means of their largely-ineffectual conspicuous compassion.

Someone somewhere recently joked that we should start calling this generation of leftists the ctrl-left, in honor of their relationship to their mirror image, the alt-right. Brilliant. I’m all in favor of it.

And there you have it — for zealots like Snyder, there is no such thing as neutral ground in a holy war. Likewise, Jamelle Bouie informs us, with a pointed stare and a raised eyebrow, that using a useful descriptor like “virtue signaling” makes you guilty by association with the alt-right. Okay, fine, you got me, I surrender. Yes, I only recently stopped beating my wife. Yes, I’m a conservative. Yes, I consort with neo-Nazis in the darkest corners of the web where we plot foul deeds. Yes, I’ve sworn fealty to the Trumplord. There’s no point in arguing. Confess early, confess often. Cheerfully admit to anything and everything in the hopes that your inquisitors will conclude you’re too insane to understand what you’re even saying.

According to the usual voices on the multiculti left, the author Lionel Shriver gave an address at a literary festival in which she largely quoted entire passages from Mein Kampf. The full transcript, for those of you intrepid souls brave enough to face the beast head-on, can be found here.

There’s little to be said that hasn’t been said before. The left will always subject reality to Procrustean torture to make it fit the alienation/oppression framework that gives structure to their entire worldview. Still, even I, jaded though I might be, couldn’t help but chuckle involuntarily upon seeing white people on social media declare that of course white people like Shriver don’t understand what cultural appropriation really is (despite the fact that in her speech, Shriver quoted a definition of the term from a seemingly-unimpeachable source). According to other people of pallor, the real issue is about her lack of empathy, or maybe it’s about unjust power differentials. But by their own reasoning, who are these people to affirm what cultural appropriation is or isn’t? On what philosophical grounds do they assert their vision of justice to be objective and factually accurate when all else is relative? Either they have somehow managed to miraculously surmount the apparently-genetic inability of white people to understand left-wing ideological axioms, or perhaps those axioms are normative statements — ostensibly objective facts, their proponents might even say — about the world which can be understood by anyone.

And thus we run up against a modern version of the ancient Epimenides paradox, which you can see acted out in real time on social media every day. All white people are stained by the sins of racism and colonialism and must unquestioningly defer to the judgment of people of color, says a white leftist, just before arrogantly dismissing the objections of non-white people who disagree with him. Lesser contradictions abound as well — Kenan Malik reiterates how the supposedly-progressive notions aimed at preventing a slippery slope to racial hatred and genocide are theoretically identical to those supporting old-fashioned racial separatism. Sonny Bunch notes the astonishing irony of Shriver’s loudest critic claiming to want to be “challenged” and made “uncomfortable”. I hate to validate anything about psychoanalysis, but it’s hard to avoid thinking that there’s very little about these people that can’t be explained as an illustration of projection.

Often, after a way of talking has obviously outlived its usefulness, a period of inarticulateness ensues; it’s not yet clear how we should talk going forward.

So there I was, reading this review of J.D. Vance’s much-talked-about book, Hillbilly Elegy, wondering when I might finally find something that inspired me to write, when these words separated themselves from their context and leapt off the page to slap my cheek.

Yesterday marked eleven years since I started this blog. (I didn’t start writing regularly for a few more, but still.) A lot changes over a decade-plus, especially if you’re still fairly young at the start. The cumulative effect of all that change is that I find myself wondering if this particular “way of talking” has outlived its usefulness. I have certainly felt inarticulate lately, plagued by a strange sense of not knowing what to say about this, that or the other — or, perhaps, simply not feeling the need to bother saying it. It’s not depression, or exhaustion, or anything like that. I don’t even think of it as “writer’s block” — I have plenty of things I could say, I just don’t feel like saying them here, in this context. They don’t seem to measure up to some inscrutable standard I’ve somehow set for myself. I’m not sure what that’s about.

I’ve felt like this before, and that, too passed. Maybe this will as well. But like the Ship of Theseus, I suspect that enough tiny details have slowly changed over time to make this a different situation. Much of what I thought and was willing to say in print a decade ago seems callow and superficial to me now, but I haven’t yet come up with a positive replacement for it. “I’ve changed my mind so much I can’t even trust it/My mind changed me so much I can’t even trust myself”, said Isaac Brock. Is time and patience the only cure? Or should I change scenery and start posting exclusively at my other sites, laying this one to rest like putting away childish things?

Despite my moments of bravado, I struggle at industry events (and in life) with the sense that I don’t rep a certain standard of beauty and so when I show up to the Met Ball surrounded by models and swan-like actresses it’s hard not to feel like a sack of flaming garbage. This felt especially intense with a handsome athlete as my dinner companion and a bunch of women I was sure he’d rather be seated with. But I went ahead and projected these insecurities and made totally narcissistic assumptions about what he was thinking, then presented those assumptions as facts.

Projected insecurities and narcissistic assumptions! I’d like to think that this brief glimpse of undiluted self-awareness will have a lasting effect on her, but I doubt it. Lena, dear, as long as we’re being honest and confessional here, you’ve never been fooling anyone but yourself. No amount of inspirational rhetoric about body positivity, no number of photos taken of you sitting naked on the toilet stuffing your face with cake, will ever change the fact that this has always been a sad, pathetic attempt to beat your critics to the punch by “owning” your weaknesses. Aggressively flaunting your insecurities doesn’t make them go away; it just becomes a new role for you to get trapped in.

That’s the weird thing about Generation Safe Space — for whatever reason, the pendulum has swung back into learned helplessness. There are countless people who are fat and unattractive but manage to accept it and get on with their lives. People like Dunham, or Lindy West, are especially tiresome because they clearly desperately want to be among the beautiful people, but rather than put in the effort necessary to achieve it, they try to pre-empt the possibility of failure by refusing to play, claiming the game is rigged, and like so many people who have sat through media studies classes, they think that there are no such things as innate preferences that can’t be re-engineered through advertising and lecturing. Honestly, diet and exercise, however tough it can be, is still much easier than wasting that time and energy on endless rationalizations. Changing your own habits is much more likely to succeed than subjecting society to a propaganda barrage in the hope of making obese homeliness the new beauty standard. And, you know, most people, even the beautiful ones, still have fears and insecurities. They just refuse to allow their lives to be defined by them. Whatever happened to simply refusing to give a shit about the opinions of superficial people who judge you on appearance?

Anyway, a few weeks ago I decided to resume my tumblr, on which I was very active for around eight years or so — I’ll have my 10-year Tumblrversary next March — because I wasn’t getting a ton of traffic here and I thought “Why bother to post stuff that almost no one reads?”

I resemble that remark, so allow me to offer some answers.

For the sheer joy of expression which requires no external validation

To avoid pestering individual friends with long-winded emails

For posterity

To nurture a self-pitying fantasy of yourself as a misunderstood genius surrounded by unappreciative philistines

Montaigne wrote his Essays without an audience for ten years before publishing them (if it was good enough for him…)

To give solid form, structure, and clarity to your thoughts

Because when you read a lot of books, your head gets filled with words, and if you don’t empty them out periodically, they’ll start talking amongst themselves, and the din will be unbearable

To look busy at work

For its own sake, as with other spiritual disciplines and practices

To be surprised by how often a piece of your writing looks better when rediscovered

Because even the latent possibility of an audience keeps you from lapsing into “Dear Diary” self-indulgence

For the same reason we do almost anything beyond eating, sleeping, and reproducing: to distract ourselves from thinking about our inevitable deaths

Because the older generations walked miles every day to work tirelessly on the website factory assembly lines so that you kids could one day have the luxury of playing with preassembled, smoothly-functioning text editing platforms in any color or design you could want, so I really don’t think it’s asking too much that you take a few minutes to sit down and use the thing without crying about the fact that it doesn’t come with an audience included

When Dreger pointed approvingly on Twitter to University of Chicago’s statement on “safe spaces,” I told her that most of my liberal Twitter follows were enthusiastically sharing this piece, UChicago’s anti-safe spaces letter isn’t about academic freedom. It’s about power. The piece makes some coherent points, but mostly it is self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation. At a certain point the cultural Left no longer made any pretense to being liberal, and transformed themselves into “progressives.” They have taken Marcuse’s thesis in Repressive Tolerance to heart.

Though I hope that Dreger and her fellow travelers succeed in rolling back the clock, I suspect that the battle here is lost. She points out, correctly, that the total politicization of academia will destroy its existence as a producer of truth in any independent and objective manner. More concretely, she suggests it is likely that conservatives will simply start to defund and direct higher education even more stridently than they do now, because they will correctly see higher education as purely a tool toward the politics of their antagonists. I happen to be a conservative, and one who is pessimistic about the persistence of a public liberal space for ideas that offend. If progressives give up on liberalism of ideas, and it seems that many are (the most famous defenders of the old ideals are people from earlier generations, such as Nadine Strossen and Wendy Kaminer, with Dreger being a young example), I can’t see those of us in the broadly libertarian wing of conservatism making the last stand alone.

Honestly, I don’t want any of my children learning “liberal arts” from the high priests of the post-colonial cult. In the near future the last resistance on the Left to the ascendency of identity politics will probably be extinguished, as the old guard retires and dies naturally. The battle will be lost. Conservatives who value learning, and intellectual discourse, need to regroup. Currently there is a populist mood in conservatism that has been cresting for a generation. But the wave of identity politics is likely to swallow the campus Left with its intellectual nihilism. Instead of expanding outward it is almost certain that academia will start cannibalizing itself in internecine conflict when all the old enemies have been vanquished.

During my romantic youth, I read the autobiography of Russell Means, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement. As an ethnic liberation movement sticking it to The White Man, AIM was, of course, beloved by left-wing radicals. Means, though, was interesting, and not just because he eventually ended up running for President on the Libertarian party ticket a couple times (once as Larry Flynt’s running mate). I recall him talking about how, when he finally served a couple years in federal prison, he made an effort to read Marx at the urging of fellow radicals, only to conclude that Marx’s view of the environment was just as acquisitive and destructive as any capitalist’s. In the mid-’80s, he burned all the bridges to his left by supporting MISURASATA, a rebellious coalition of Nicaraguan Indians, against the Sandinistas. As he tells it, the Indian regions under Somoza had been self-sufficient and largely self-governing, but the Sandinistas were determined to impose forced integration and relocation upon them, using all the tools of traditional colonialism. When he tried to spread the word about the movement, he found that he was effectively blacklisted from the same universities that had happily supported him just a few years earlier — until the Unification Church, the infamous Moonies, stepped in to give him a platform for a speaking tour. This choice of bedfellows, combined with his political heresy, cemented his former allies’ opinions of him. He never supported the Contras, or the Moonies, for that matter, but the mere fact of his association with groups like that, however strategically self-serving, was enough to pronounce him guilty.

So, yes, Alice Dreger. I read her book last year and liked it. I see from Razib’s post that she recently delivered the FIRE 2016 keynote address, which I’m sure has likewise cemented hostile opinions about her. Like many others, she seems to hold faith in some Platonic ideal of “liberalism” different from the way liberalism is actually practiced today; like Razib, I am impressed by her tenacity, but suspect she’s fighting a losing battle. The first article I read about her quoted her as being “uncomfortable” with the fact that she was attracting more conservative followers on Twitter, and last fall, she was still trying to distance herself from the dreaded c-word, for all the good that will do. I’m not saying she, or anyone else, should just give in and identify with the term; I’m saying that there is no point in hoping that you will be granted an exemption from slander due to your impeccable integrity. If you cross the party line, you’ll be treated just as uncharitably as any other caricature. As long as you fear excommunication, it’s a weakness, and people will sense that and exploit it.

I love the ideal, the fantasy, of academia. Easy to do, of course, from the naive perspective of a bookworm with a mere high-school diploma and a Whitman’s Sampler of community college classes to his credit. But a life devoted to reading, researching and writing while cloistered away in a library still tickles my fancy. It may simply be that a clownish curmudgeon like Morris Berman had the right idea after all — those who value such ideals will have to find a way to practice and preserve them without institutional support, without recognition, until one day, hopefully, when the intellectual climate changes for the better.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.